She did her work with the thoroughness of a mind which reveres details and never quite understands them.

Writers have a rare power not given to anyone else: we can bore people long after we are dead.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

Most troubles are unnecessary. We have Nature beaten; we can make her grow wheat; we can keep warm when she sends blizzards. So we raise the devil just for pleasure--wars, politics, race-hatreds, labor-disputes.

You have more people that love you than you know.

The game (baseball)was a custom of his clan, and it gave outlet for the homicidal and sides-taking instincts which Babbitt called "patriotism" and "love of sport."